We’ve known since last month that Klout was being acquired by Lithium Technologies, thanks to a report from Re/code, but it was never confirmed until yesterday when CNN reported that it was official.
Now, the companies have come out and officially announced it. They didn’t disclose the terms, but CNN had it at about $200 million.
Lithium Acquires Klout from Lithium on Vimeo.
Klout CEO and co-founder Joe Fernandez wrote a blog post about it. Here’s an excerpt:
Over the last six years, we’ve integrated signals from seven social networks and added data from Wikipedia, Bing Search, and more. We distribute Klout data into the world more than 50 billion times per month, work with nearly half of Ad Age’s top digital brands, and have delivered more than a million Perks to our amazing users. While we have some impressive accomplishments, I view this as just the beginning.
As Klout takes the next step toward helping our users maximize their impact online, I believe that Lithium is the ideal partner. Lithium powers many of the most vibrant communities online for leading brands like Spotify, Skype and Sephora. Together, we can do more to help you share your passions, measure your impact, and grow your reputation.
I want you to know that our mission has not changed — Lithium shares our passion for empowering every person to understand and maximize their impact online. Klout will continue helping people be great online. You will still be able to get insights about your social media performance, find new content to share, and be rewarded with Perks on both Klout.com and our mobile app.
Lithium CEO Rob Tarkoff also blogged about it, saying:
The combination brings together the 100 million consumers who engage across Lithium communities every month with the 500 million consumers touched by Klout to establish one of the biggest data footprints of consumer attitudes, preferences and activities.
Lithium and Klout both have deep expertise and capabilities in driving engagement – combined, our ability to put trust back at the center of the relationship between consumers and brands is unmatched.
He says Lithium will reveal what the acquisition means for its product roadmap at its LiNC 2014 conference.
The acquisition came on the heels of a major overhaul of Klout’s site, which includes a prominent content recommendation feed, which suggests stories for users to share to help them boost their Klout scores.
Read our recent pre-acquisition interview with Fernandez here.
Image via Lithium
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